Chapter 5 Creatively engaging readers in the later primary years

READING AND LEARNING

Reading is central tool of learning and one that underpins learning across the curriculum. In order to learn from reading, readers must engage with the text they are reading in a way that ensures that what they read connects with and stays in their minds afterwards; that is, readers need to read actively, making links with what is already known and expanding or adjusting schema to include the new information (Rumelhart,1985; Wray and Lewis, 1997). But readers come to texts with many different purposes – they may want to identify specific information, get a sense of what it was like to live in a particular time, entertain themselves, and so on. Rosenblatt (1985) distinguishes between two different kinds of reading: efferent and aesthetic. In efferent reading, the reader’s attention is centred on what should be retained after the reading, such as information to be acquired or a process to be followed. In aesthetic reading, readers focus on what they are living through during the reading and pay attention to ides, characters, images and so forth. Of course, either kind of response is possible to most texts depending on the reader’s stance. Creative teachers of reading seek to maintain a balance between these two kinds of responses in literacy sessions and across the curriculum; for example, seeing the aesthetic potential within information texts, as well as using them for information gathering and textual analysis. (See Chapter 10 for discussion of non-fiction texts.)

A study of World War II at KS2, for example, will involve reading information books on the topic, watching film materials, exploring written and visual artefacts such as ration cards and posters, and searching the Internet for relevant websites, which need multimodal literacies to read them. These reading events offer opportunities for efferent transactions and – in creative classrooms – aesthetic transactions. A ration card, for example, could be viewed as an information source, but it could also prompt discussion, drama and role-play about queuing for supplies, the desire for rare foodstuff and the struggle to feed a family. In planning to work creatively, teachers need to consider their purposes for examining texts as this will prompt different stances.
Learning about this period should also involve reading narrative, poetry and first person accounts. These offer rich opportunities for the reader to engage with the emotions, sights, sounds and smells experienced. Emotionally engaging stories about this period include, for example, the novels: Goodnight Mr Tom by Michele Magorian, Line of Fire: Diary of an Unknown Soldier translated by Sarah Ardizzone, Once by Morris Gleitzman and the picture fiction books: War Boy by Michael Foreman, My War Diary by Marcia Williams, and Rose Blanche by Christophe Gallanz and edited by Ian McEwan. Each of these offers powerful opportunities for readers to be involved in aesthetic transactions with the text. Creative teachers often offer a summary of several novels and then negotiate with their class which of these might become the core book for their extended unit of work which will also encompass writing. As Clark (2013) has shown young people who read above the level expected for their age also write above the expected level, the inverse is also evidenced. Reading challenging texts to children and fostering independent reading remains important in the later primary years. Creative teachers will also recommend texts to young readers, perhaps seeking to stretch the oldest primary children’s understanding about war through suggesting Mal Peet’s Life: An exploded diagram ( set in the time of the Cold War) or Jason Wallace’s Out of the Shadows (about a newly independent Zimbabwe), during a unit on War.